Intelligent Avalon/WinFX Remoting. This is kind of a complex topic, and something I’ve written on before. Longhorn and Vista will have a new programming interface called WinFX. (WinFX includes the new presentation layer that was codenamed “Avalon.”) WinFX will do a lot of things, but in terms of Terminal Server, the biggest change will be how developers write their applications to deal with screen space. Applications will be able to more intelligently draw their windows and deal with available screen space. This will provide an opportunity for a big change for Terminal Server and RDP. In today’s version of RDP, the RDP protocol acts as a display driver, and the RDP client device receives whatever the server sends to its display driver. (This is what I call the “screen scraping”-based technology.) In Longhorn with WinFX, Microsoft is building a more intelligent RDP engine that can intelligently intercept and redirect raw WinFX calls (or “WinFX Primatives” to use Microsoft’s term) and send them down to the client where the client’s local WinFX engine can do the processing and display them. This has several advantages, including the fact that server resources and network utilization will be reduced and that the client device can have the “full” WinFX application experience even over a remote session.

More by following the link including features that Microsoft has no plans to build.